Today’s post is a bit different. I’m not going to share how to do this in SharePoint, or that in Office 365. Instead, I’m going to share how & why I created the O365 Data Retriever tool, which I made available on Github yesterday, Aug 22nd 2018. Why did I create the tool? A few months back, I was looking at doing something on my spare time, that would improve my skills in PowerShell, or maybe SharePoint.

OneDrive for Business is your personal storage in Office 365 and also available in SharePoint on-premises. When enabled, OneDrive for Business is actually a site collection within SharePoint, and a great way to share documents and collaborate between colleagues without sending large emails! Microsoft offers OneDrive for Business (online), but also (if your company allows it) a Sync Client if you wish to sync your documents locally. In this blog post, we are going to use OneDrive for Business with Office 365, and share documents with the online version.

Site Policies in SharePoint can be used to have a better governance as the platform is growing. Storage is expensive, so if you let your (unused) sites just “sitting there“, then it’s not a good use of money is it? If you need more information about Site Policies, start with an Overview of site policies in SharePoint Server. In this blog post, we are going to use PnP PowerShell to retrieve site policies that are applied in SharePoint Online site collections.

We have so many different ways to achieve something using PowerShell. In this blog post, we’ll have a look at how we can create Site Collections in SharePoint Server using an XML file and PowerShell (of course!) Create the XML file XML (eXtensible Markup Language) files have their syntax, so it’s important to be familiar with it. If you’re not, have a look at the Introduction to XML provided by w3chools.

Fast Site Collection Creation is a new feature in SharePoint 2016, that enables Site Collections to be created in a much faster way that in previous versions. This feature actually uses a copy of a site template which is stored in the content database, with all the site’s features already enabled. If a SharePoint administrator has a requirement for creating 50 Team Sites, enabling Fast Site Collection creation is a time saver in the long run.

Very quick post today. Or rather a tip that I use every time I have a new SharePoint Farm 🙂 When we need to access the Term Store, we need to click on Manage Service Applications, then click on the Managed Metadata Service Application, and then we have access to the Term Store. If we want to access the User Properties, we need to go to the Service Applications, click on the User Profile Service Application, and then select what we wish.

Today is all about SharePoint taxonomy with PowerShell PnP! In a nutshell, taxonomy is a hierarchical group of term sets & terms, that is provided by SharePoint when configuring the Managed Metadata Service Application (MMS). Creation of terms is done via the Term Store in SharePoint Server (when MMS is configured), and is also available in SharePoint Online. For more information about SharePoint taxonomy, get started with the following links:

SQL Aliases are optional (but recommended), and are a great way to configure your SharePoint environment. They allow for flexibility in case the SQL instance is changed, or the server names/IPs change then it’s possible to only “re-point” to the new servers. This way, there’s no need to reinstall SharePoint for the new server/instance. SQL Aliases are configured on each SharePoint Server. This is very important to remember! Let’s dive in and configure our aliases.